8 Months In Tech
I spent the last 8 months of my life working. It was really weird, cool and—above all—enlightening.
I began my journey in Big (and mid-sized) Tech™️ in January. Usually I would be in school around that time, but I took a semester off from my studies at UC Berkeley mainly because I needed the money. Instead, I started a software engineering internship at Stripe in Seattle at a very interesting time.
I joined the Buy Now Pay Later team under the Payments organization at Stripe. If you know what Stripe is, you probably also know that working on payments is the thing to do while you’re there. And indeed, I did get to work on and edit payments within my second week there. My time there was very eventful. My team halved in size during the course of my internship, and because of that I was given a lot more responsibility. Truthfully: it was exciting.
For my first big internship (at a decacorn no less!) it was a great experience. I got to do a lot of great software engineering, and contribute to the release of Affirm as a payment method. It was really exciting to work on stuff that wasn’t theoretical and had an impact on people and stock prices (AFRM to be exact). I truly felt like a real software engineer.
One thing I learned the value of during my internship was Test Driven Development. It gets taught in certain courses and programs, but having to use it in practice is really powerful. What’s more is it seems that I became the first engineer at Stripe to write end to end synthetic tests for a payment method. As an intern!
Beyond just work in the spring, I got to do a lot more of what I wanted to. I got explore all of my different hobbies. I read a lot, worked on and released an album with accompanying artwork, and explored Seattle while I was up there. It’s a truly beautiful area.
I come from a small barrio (town/community) in Northeast Los Angeles, and I will probably write and talk more about how that relates to my experiences in tech later. For now, I’ll just say that I felt like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz when she said “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” The expensive restaurants, parties, and tech culture seemed (and still does seem) incompatible with my upbringing.
Nonetheless, I took in the Seattle tech culture and learned a lot from everyone there. I even got to meet John Collison and ask him about Stripe’s efforts on diversity & equity.
After leaving Seattle, I got to relax and hang out in Berkeley for a while before starting my summer internship at LinkedIn in Sunnyvale.
What a vibe switch. I felt the difference in age and size of the companies almost immediately. In direct contrast with Stripe, I went almost half my internship before writing my first lines of code. Rather, the first half was spent researching and designing the architecture for a project that my manager told me would definitely not be completed during my internship.
The engineering went a lot slower at LinkedIn than at Stripe. I’m glad I got to experience that because it really informed what I value in a company. While LinkedIn had a really great company culture (think music festivals for employees, Fridays off, great food), the speed and impact of engineering was not the same. At the same time, I did learn a lot about forward thinking software engineering. Tech tends to glorify the build fast, break shit mentality. While it works for high speed growth at startups, it can come back to haunt companies who then have to redesign their systems.
Being in Silicon Valley as a software engineering intern in the summer is an unbeatable experience. From intern beach bonfires to meetings with some of the most promising startups, there was always something happening. I got to see the Bay Area like I never had before in college.
The first two-thirds of 2022 will hold a special place in my heart because of all the learning and growing that came alongside the fun. I’ve still got two years of college left, and one more summer internship left, so it’s only getting started for me. I’m still figuring out what interests me within software engineering, but the last 8 months gave me some direction. Only God knows what I’ll be up to next. I’m excited to see what that is.
